What I Read in August 2012

Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies. An interesting — and at times infuriating — demolishing of all those things you think you know. Inequality is not bad and is probably not real. Women are not discriminated against in employment. More…

David Lodge, A Man of Parts. H. G. Wells is remembered today for The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, but he was the author of tens of novels, active in socialist and other causes, and a lover of women, many women. In this biography as novel, David Lodge reveals both his inner and outer lives.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls. In this late Bowen novel, three women in late middle age meet again. They have not seen each other since they were little girls at school. Their memories of that time are strong, but their present intentions seem more than a little muddled.

Connie Willis, DoomsdayBook. This is not just time travel. This is history, experienced or imagined — it doesn’t matter what you call it — as it is lived, then and now. The young historian goes back to the 1300′s. Someone miscalculated. Epidemics rage, in both time periods. Will she survive?

Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy. This is the last of the books I have read in anticipation of the “dismal economics” course this fall. Sometimes I get it and sometimes I don’t, Robinson’s economic philosophy, but the philosophy is certainly clearer than the economics. “Any economic system requires a set of rules, an ideology to justify them, and a conscience in the individual which makes him strive to carry them out.”

Joseph Roth, The Tale of the 1002nd Night. If Scheherazade and kept talking for one more night, she might have told this story. The Shah of Persia visits Vienna and sets into motion a series of events of dubious value. Some of the characters, like the correct but dim-witted cavalry officer, will be familiar to readers of Joseph Roth’s more well-known The Radetzky March, but other are more diverse. The mood is detached, cynical at times.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. More time travel by the energetic Oxford historians (see Doomsday Book). The dog, Cyril, accompanies three men in a boat as one of them tries to repair a discontinuity in the space-time continuum which an earlier traveler may have caused. Don’t take it too seriously — a good time is had by all including, of course, Cyril.

Nancy Horan, Loving Frank. This is a novel about a scandal, a very real scandal about which the participants said very little at the time, although everyone else had a great deal to say. Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, went off to Europe with the wife of a client. Both left their marriages and children in order to be together.

Stacy Schiff, Vera. This biography of the wife of poet and novelist Vladimir Nabokov brings us into the details of the lives of two unusual people. He wrote. She was his typist, agent, adviser, translator, and  muse.

I’m closing out the month early because we are leaving on a trip. Reading continues, but posting will be interrupted for a couple of weeks. Hasta la vista.

What I Read in June 2012

Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women. This biography for young people, written in the 1930s, is accurate and insightful, if somewhat incomplete. No romance here, but a solid sense of Alcott’s accomplishment.

Sara Paretsky, Total Recall: A V. I. Warshawski Novel. The Chicago female private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Washshawski, meets schemers and crazies in this suspenseful novel of Holocaust victims, survivors, and the immoral insurance companies who rip them off.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low. Free at last, after 554 pages. Click here for my comment on the first half of the book. The second half is concerned with the structure of the French criminal justice system; the layout of the prisons and the courts (no corridor or staircase is omitted); the lawyers, magistrates, procurators, chaplains, turnkeys, police, detectives, detectives in disguise, spies, criminals — major, petty and demented. He puts forward some interesting theories about criminals. Instead of marijuana as an entry-level drug, we have the sex-obsessed man who steals a shawl for his girlfriend and goes on to a life of crime. It will be a long time before I persist to the end of another Balzac.

Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Housekeep Book. Peg understands. It’s not so much that I hate housekeeping. It’s not like war or mosquitoes — I do admit its necessity. It’s just that I have better things to think about, much less do. Written in 1962, the technology has changed somewhat, but the principles are as true as they ever were.

Richard Russo, The Risk Pool. The risk pool is where you have to get your insurance when you have had so many accidents no insurance company will have you as a customer. In this early novel, Russo tells the story of Sam Hall — energetic and smart, but also uneducated, sometimes alcoholic and always a risk taker.

Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves. By five pages in I knew that I had read this one before, but it was all so pleasant that I just kept going. No surprises in this tale of a young woman who settles — temporarily? she is not sure — in an English village, but a lot of worthy characters and amusing incidents.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life. To tell of the life of Cleopatra, Schiff must also tell of Caesar and Pompey and Octavia and Mark Antony, especially Mark Mark Antony. The life is skillfully told in a book dense with history and rich with the images of ancient Egypt.

Peg Bracken, I Didn’t Come Here to Argue. The switch from Cleopatra to Peg Bracken is to go from queenly edicts in ancient Egypt to American middle class commentary. These diverse essays are a follow on to The I Hate To Housekeep Book (see above). A little dated, but a welcome diversion after Ptolemaic troubles.

Susan Cheever, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. Just the facts about Alcott’s life with personal commentary by the author of American Bloomsbury. Cheever sees Alcott within her world, not ours. I hope to have more comments on the book in July.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

Which would you like, the personal Cleopatra or the political Cleopatra? I knew the personal one as a giggling teenager in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and in the movie by that name (Vivian Leigh, before she was Scarlett). I knew a mature, poetic Cleopatra from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Great fun, great drama, but certainly not one woman. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” as the Bard said.

In Stacy Schiff’s biography of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, I detect a political Cleopatra. A descendant of Ptolemy and the Macedonian Greeks who apportioned out his empire after the death of Alexander the Great, Cleopatra was the successful ruler of an independent Egypt for 20 years. The conniving and scheming of which she has stood convicted these many centuries were the maneuvers of a ruler trying to hold onto her own. She succeeded for a substantial period in this time of civil wars interspersed with wars of conquest which were a smash and grab for power and treasure. In the end she lost not just her life, but the independence of Egypt and any possible future for her children in the Ptolemaic dynasty.

This book gives us Rome as seen from the other side of the Mediterranean, a nation determined to build an empire which would not be a federation of kingdoms and cultures like Alexander’s, but a set of dependencies, controlled by Rome. Last year when I read the Aeneid, I was appalled by the glorification of Rome. Telling the story of Aeneas’ escape from Troy to found the future Rome, the first part is modeled on the Odyssey (a man returning home) and the second part on the Iliad (battle and conquest). Whereas the Greeks fought for personal glory and for treasure, the proto-Romans under Aeneas fought to establish an empire which was still supposedly centuries in the future. All the mayhem was justified because Rome would bring peace and prosperity to all.

Cleopatra’s story and Cleopatra’s fate tell us something else. Schiff says,

If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her [Cleopatra's] death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and — as would be apparent within a decade or so — as  a monarchy.